Track 1: When Love Has More Blues Than Red Roses

I’d like to think of myself as the kind of R&B love jam you want to come home to.

Not the kind you collect the vinyls for just to hang them up on the wall, but the kind that gets played on repeat because you can’t get enough. Some men buy records just to put them in a frame. It’s fornostalgia is what they say.

I’ve learned that love always changes. Sometimes it leaves but maybe only for a little while. Maybe it swings back around something like a broken record and tap dances in your dreams. Wake Up! Wake Up! it shouts and laughs and jives with your heart in sync and your right mind out of it with two left feet. Maybe it’s a sweet thing.

Let’s be clear. I am 20 years old and I do believe in love. I believe this small body of mine holds that intangible thing and all of God is in me to claim this.

I don’t believe I’m too young.

My parents separated when I was barely in elementary school and later divorced. My view on relationships has really been carved out of that. It’s honestly something I still don’t talk about because I’m very aware my big heart was born out of it as well as my fears.

While I’ve been in college, I’ve experienced what it means to be in a relationship and to have another person really become a part of your life. Maybe I’ve given him more love than he deserves but it’s a very spiritual thing to me so I take it very seriously. I’m too much of a romantic to enjoy random dating so finding someone I actually see myself growing with is actually a really big deal. Living as a millennial with the heart of someone’s grandparent (just a exaggeration) is about the most exhausting thing.

A part of my journey with Truthfully Tayloris about accepting all the things about other people and situations I cannot change and learning how to forgive myself, be honest about what I need and how I feel, and be genuinely happy. I honestly just want that for everyone else too. I know that telling stories about love and heartbreaks and forgiving the people in our lives who can’t give us what we need is so hard.

I realize that sometimes there are more shades of blue in love than I can control. I know that my parents’ divorce wasn’t because they didn’t love each other anymore in the same way I know just because me and someone I love and who loves me can’t be together is because we aren’t on the same path in life. I always try my best and that’s all I can be in control of.

Love has always been the greatest art to me. I’m so happy at this point in my life. I can’t be afraid to love and show my truth to the world because I know God has planted it in my heart. I don’t want to be afraid to feel it’s rough edges because it might cut me or be too afraid of breaking it that I never really get to feel what it means to love someone other than myself and I mean really love someone. There’s such a joy in that.

We have to stop being afraid of being vulnerable. Let God guide our hearts to take down these walls and open up doors we never even thought we wanted. I pray to find a love like my favorite R&B jam. One that transforms me. One I can always come home to.